The ruling National Conference president and former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Farooq Abdullah Monday accused Governor Manoj Sinha of “sitting over the files” and “delaying” government work.
“He’s sitting over the files. I asked him, ‘how many times’,” he told the media after civil secretariat resumed functioning in Jammu after the Darbar Move. “I told him one day ‘you demoted the (Sher-e-Kashmir) Institute of Medical Sciences, Srinagar’. He said ‘No, no, it has got its autonomy’. That was a complete lie.”
He went on to say: “I beg of him, for God’s sake, move the files so that people can benefit”.
Asked whether he meant that LG was preventing the elected government from working, Farooq said there was no question of stopping work. “He cannot stop it, but he is delaying things by sitting over the files. This is the only thing he’s doing,” he said, asking Lt Governor to be “a friend of the people and the government”.
“That is for what he’s there for,” he said. “If the administration becomes an obstacle instead of a facilitator, how will progress be achieved?”
This comes days after a jibe from Lt Governor Manoj Sinha that the elected government must “stop using absence of statehood as an excuse” for inaction. At the UT’s Foundation Day event at Sher-i-Kashmir International Conference Centre (SKICC), he said that the state’s NC government under the Omar Abdullah had “all the powers” needed to function effectively and reiterated Home Minister Amit Shah’s statement in Parliament that Jammu and Kashmir will have statehood restored “at an appropriate time”.
“…but some people have some problems,” he said, adding that the elected government cannot say that work can’t be done till statehood is restored.
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On the restoration of statehood, Farooq Abdullah hoped that it would happen soon, and urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi “to provide relief to the flood-affected people from the state”.
